Saturday, October 30, 2010

ROCKSTAR SUPERSTAR

Generally when I sell stuff in foreign markets I never really know much about what happens. I get these long threads of emails that go through several agents in various locations that conclude with my American agent saying: "I think we should take this."

And so we do, even though I don't really have any idea who exactly is going to do it, or who will translate it or what it will look like.

Then a weird contract shows up that is badly translated and has some weird local dialectical flavor to it. Or it's for some large looking amount of money that turns out to be not much money at all. (Or the reverse: it looks like a relatively small amount of Euros, which then, once you calculate the exchange rate, is actually a nice little chunk of change.)

Anyway, so today I got a really nice note from my German editor at Beltz (who have done a bunch of my books now, starting with GIRL. "Cool Girl" they called it.) Oh my god, I thought, an actual person! He sent along the cover of the forthcoming German edition of ROCKSTAR SUPERSTAR.

And so I wrote back to him and told him how as a student in Berlin, I would spend hours at the bookshops checking out the awesome German Editions of all my favorite authors: Bukowski, Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, etc.

I used to be amazed at how the German Shops seemed to ONLY carry my favorite authors. No crap here. And if it was something I didn't know (like Musil's THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES) I could pretty much know that I needed to read it. Sometimes I would even BUY it and read it right there.

The Germans had amazing taste. Or at least the Berlin Bookshops did. Of course that was in the days when the wall was still up, and Berlin was this brave little island of artsy coolness, in the then-dangerous East Bloc ...

Anyway, all I was meaning to say, was how it really is such an honor to get published in cool places. You know you are in excellent company.